Alice the Brave Read online

  “Is this a religious experience?” I asked.

  Dad looked over at me. “I guess you could call it that,” he said.

  It was hard to sleep after I crawled in the tent again, but I must have drifted off, because I woke to the sounds of Elizabeth and Pamela whispering.

  Pamela: “Should we wake Alice?”

  Elizabeth: “No! It’s none of our business what they’re doing.”

  Pamela: “I’ll bet she’d be mad if we didn’t.”

  I opened one eye. “What’s going on?” I murmured.

  There was silence in the tent. I opened both eyes.

  “Your dad and Miss Summers,” Pamela said.

  I sat straight up. Was it possible they could have announced their engagement without me?

  “What about them?” I scrambled to the door of our tent and looked out. I could hear little murmurs and occasional giggles. Dad and Miss Summers were nowhere to be seen, but something was going on in Miss Summers’s tent, because it was jiggling.

  I could feel my face beginning to flush. Miss Summers’s tent was turned so that you couldn’t see the opening, but I didn’t have to see it. I knew that Dad and Miss Summers were in there together, and suddenly I felt really angry at them. Why did they have to do this now, with Elizabeth and Pamela and me listening?

  Pamela grinned. “Some people prefer the morning,” she said.

  Suddenly Dad appeared on the other side of Miss Summers’s tent. He had all his clothes on.

  “Anyone think to bring tweezers?” he said when he saw us watching. “The zipper on Sylvia’s tent flap is stuck halfway down, and we’ve been working ten minutes to free it.”

  I couldn’t help myself. I ran over and gave him a hug. “Good morning!” I said.

  Dad looked at me strangely. So did Miss Summers, who was wriggling out her tent flap from beneath. She was dressed too.

  “Maybe Pamela and Elizabeth and I can fix the zipper,” I offered.

  “Good. Then Sylvia and I will get breakfast,” said Dad.

  We worked for fifteen minutes on the zipper, and finally we got it working again. By that time the air was filled with the fresh-air smells of breakfast, the best breakfast I ever had. Bacon and eggs and pan-fried toast. After that, all five of us climbed Sugarloaf together and stood up there looking way out over the countryside, the breeze whipping at our shirts. It was one of the best weekends I could remember. A magical end to a magical camping trip.

  About halfway home, however, sitting in the backseat beside Pamela and Elizabeth, I realized that Dad had the radio playing and Miss Summers was looking out her side of the window. Occasionally they turned to each other and said something, but somehow it didn’t seem like it had when we were driving up there. Maybe all the magic had been in my head, not in the stars.

  Dad let Pamela out first, then Elizabeth and me, and then he left to drive Miss Summers home.

  Lester was cleaning the tape deck of our VCR when I came in.

  “I thought I was going to have the whole day free of you,” Lester told me.

  “Well, you knew we’d come home,” I said. “What did you do while we were gone?”

  Lester shrugged. “Nothing special.”

  “I’ll bet you had Marilyn over.”

  Lester didn’t answer, just went on tinkering.

  “Lester, look me in the eye and tell me whether Marilyn Rawley was here last night.”

  “Who are you, the Gestapo?”

  I went out in the kitchen to dump the camping stuff—the ice chest and everything. I was thinking some more about Mom and what Dad had told me about her. I walked back into the living room.

  “Do I look at all like Mom?” I asked.

  Lester glanced over at me. “Turn around.”

  I turned around slowly.

  “No,” he told me.

  “Why not? What’s different?”

  “Where do you want to start? She was tall, you’re on the short side; she had really long legs, you’ve got … well, they’re not as long. She …” Lester studied me some more. “Your hair, now. That looks like Mom’s. Sort of strawberry blond. You’ve got Mom’s hair, all right.”

  “What else?”

  Lester thought some more. “You like to swim. Mom was a great swimmer.”

  I went upstairs and sat down on my bed. I knew there was a reason I was too happy this weekend. See what happens when you take chances? Dad had obviously proposed to Miss Summers, but now she’d said no. If he’d just gone on the way they were, at least he could have hoped that someday she’d want to marry him. Now he didn’t even have hope.

  If I ever took a chance and jumped in water over my head, I wouldn’t have hope either. I’d have a funeral.

  7

  LETTERS

  THERE IS ONE BIG DIFFERENCE BETWEEN the mail that leaves our house and the mail that comes in. The stamps are different. Whenever the government puts out a stamp honoring a musician or composer, Dad buys about three hundred of them. We had so many Gershwin stamps we had to keep them in a shoebox until we found space in a desk drawer.

  When I get mail, which is about five times a year, Dad or Lester puts it on the mantel, and a few days after the camping trip, I came home from the library to find an envelope with no return address.

  Patrick, I thought, tearing it open.

  From St. Jude, it read. With love, all things are possible. It sure wasn’t from Patrick. I kept reading:

  This paper has been sent to you for good luck. It has been around the world nine times. You will receive good luck. Send it on to someone you think needs good luck. DO NOT SEND MONEY as fate has no price. This letter must leave your hands within 24 hours.

  I felt as though I were holding some kind of holy paper in my hands:

  Joe Samuels received $50,000,000 and lost it because he broke the chain. While in Hawaii, Bill Walsh lost his wife after receiving this letter, because he failed to send it on. Mary Phillips received this letter and, not believing, she died!!!

  Remember, DO NOT IGNORE THIS! Thank you, St. Jude. You will receive good luck within four days of receiving this letter provided you send it on.

  I was afraid that if I didn’t mail the letter immediately, I might forget. I wasn’t in the mood for taking chances on anything these days, and I sure didn’t want to be found dead in my room with this letter still on my dresser. What if I forgot to mail it and then Dad or Lester had a heart attack? The question was, who did I want to have especially good luck? Miss Summers, I decided. I wanted Dad to propose to her again, and this time sound as though he really meant it.

  I got an envelope, put the letter inside, and sealed it just as the phone rang.

  It was Elizabeth.

  “I think you ought to go to confession with me,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I’m going to tell the priest about Arabian Nights, and I think you and Pamela should come with me, only she’s gone to the movies.”

  “Why should I go with you? I wasn’t reading that book out loud.”

  “You listened, didn’t you? I wouldn’t even have brought it over if you and Pamela hadn’t badgered me to loosen up.”

  “Elizabeth, I’m not even Catholic! What am I supposed to say?”

  “You can at least come and wait for me outside.”

  That much I could do for my friend. “If it will make you happy,” I said, and mailed the letter to Miss Summers on my way across the street.

  I don’t think I ever saw Elizabeth in such a serious mood. Nothing I could say would make her laugh, and after a while, I didn’t feel so good myself.

  “If it was a sin, Elizabeth—reading Arabian Nights to us—what will happen? I mean, are you excommunicated or something?” I’m not even sure what that means, but it has an X in it, and so does “crucifixion,” and words with Xs in them mean serious business, sex included, which got Elizabeth into Arabian Nights in the first place.

  “Of course not,” Elizabeth snapped. “It’s not a mortal sin, after all.
It’s just so embarrassing to have to tell somebody.”

  “Tell the priest you just opened the book to Abyssinian sobbings and had to find out what they were talking about,” I suggested.

  “Cut it out, Alice.”

  “Well?”

  “We never did find out what it means. And I didn’t just happen to open the book to that page. I read a lot of pages before I found the parts to read aloud. I chose them, after all. That makes it all the worse.”

  I decided that nothing I could say would make Elizabeth feel better, so I just walked along beside her like a faithful dog till we came to the church, and then I sat down and waited on the steps.

  “Good luck,” I told her.

  Every so often somebody came out or someone went in, and I felt like a heathen sitting out there. I felt the most religious—the most awestruck, I suppose—sitting out under the stars with Dad that night near Sugarloaf, thinking how somebody must have planned the universe—drawn up a blueprint, or something. But I suppose religion is like falling in love—different for different people. So I waited patiently for Elizabeth, wishing I had said something more helpful than “good luck.”

  When she came out fifteen minutes later, she looked a little better but not a lot.

  “So, are you going to purgatory or what?” I asked as I got up and followed her down the steps. Donald Sheavers used to talk a lot about purgatory, which is somewhere between heaven and hell, he told me.

  “No. I guess it wasn’t such a stiff sentence after all.”

  “What do you have to do?”

  “Three Hail Marys, one Our Father, and a Glory Be,” she said.

  I thought a Glory Be was something Aunt Sally would say. “Is that all the priest said?”

  “He said it’s normal to be curious,” Elizabeth replied.

  “Well, then!” I said, beginning to like Elizabeth’s priest. “That’s it? You confess and it’s over?”

  “No, he says the real reason I’m feeling bad about it is because I didn’t tell my parents I was taking the book, and he thinks I should confess that to them.”

  I wasn’t so sure about the priest after all. Maybe the reason I didn’t like the priest’s suggestion was that I was afraid the Prices would put the book away where Elizabeth could never find it, and I never would find out what Nubian lasciviousness was.

  “Mom will kill me,” Elizabeth muttered, and then, her voice trembling, “They’ll be so disappointed in me. They don’t even know I know about things like that.”

  “Elizabeth, we still don’t! The only difference between before and after is that we’re even more confused.”

  But once Elizabeth gets upset, there’s no comforting her. I began to wish I’d sent the St. Jude letter to her, because she was going to need all the luck she could get.

  When we went inside her house, there was an envelope propped up on the lamp table in the living room. Elizabeth went over and picked it up.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “Just mail, I guess.” It had her name on it and the same Thomas Jefferson stamp. When she opened it, there was a St. Jude letter just like mine.

  “Let me see that envelope,” I said, and studied it hard. There was a Takoma Park postmark on the stamp. I should have checked the postmark on mine: Donald Sheavers! Donald had sent those letters to us! What a dweeb!

  I went right to the phone and called Pamela, but she wasn’t home yet.

  “Did she get any mail today?” I asked her dad.

  “As a matter of fact, she did. A letter, but I don’t know who it’s from,” he said.

  “Does it have a Takoma Park postmark?” I asked.

  Mr. Jones checked. “Yep. Sure does.”

  “Thank you very much,” I told him.

  It’s not the kind of thing Donald Sheavers would think up by himself, though. I figured somebody had sent a copy to him, and he decided that all three of us—Pamela, Elizabeth, and I—needed all the luck we could get.

  Elizabeth’s mother came downstairs from where she’d been resting, and Elizabeth showed the letter to her.

  “This is absolute nonsense,” she said after she’d read it. “Poor St. Jude, I don’t know what he did to deserve this.” And she threw the letter in the trash.

  Elizabeth didn’t think any more of it, I could tell, because she was already worrying about how she was going to tell her Mom about Arabian Nights, so I decided it was a good time to go home.

  As I crossed the street, however, I was thinking about the envelope and how I could tell it was probably from Donald Sheavers by the postmark. Then I thought about the envelope I had mailed to Miss Summers, and my heart almost stopped beating, because I’d used one of our Gershwin stamps. Nobody has Gershwin stamps anymore except us, and she knows it!

  As soon as Dad got home from work, I sat down across from him in the living room: “I guess I’d better tell you about the letter,” I said. It must have been Confession Day in Silver Spring.

  “What letter?”

  “I sent a letter to Miss Summers.”

  “What?” Dad was taking off his shoes, and paused as though he’d been caught in a strobe light.

  “From St. Jude.”

  “Alice, what the devil are you talking about?”

  That just made it worse. I told him about the letter and how Miss Summers would know it was from me.

  “Why on earth would it even occur to you to send a St. Jude letter to Sylvia?” Dad asked. “Sometimes I just don’t understand you at all.”

  That made two of us. Now I was really in over my head. I felt as though I was going to cry, but that would be too easy. Dad was angry, I could tell.

  “I just thought … maybe … I don’t know.…”

  “You thought what?”

  “That maybe, because she … probably didn’t … well, say yes when you proposed.…”

  “Al, will you please keep out of my business?” He was angry, all right. Really angry. “You haven’t the slightest notion what’s going on between us, yet you get some wild idea in your head and run with it.”

  Now I was staring. “But … but you did propose, didn’t you?”

  “I’m not going to tell you everything that happens between me and Sylvia or any other woman.”

  I stared. “There’s another woman?”

  “Al!” he bellowed. “You’re driving me crazy!”

  My voice was so small I could hardly hear it: “Well, I just wish I knew what was going on sometimes.”

  “So do I! So do I!” said Dad. He threw down his shoe and took off the other. “But get one thing straight, young lady. What goes on between Sylvia and me is strictly between us. You are not to ask her anything, suggest anything, or say anything at all that treats her as something other than a teacher and a friend. Do I make myself clear?”

  I felt tears forming in my eyes and blinked. It wasn’t because he was scolding me; it was because he was saying in so many words that Miss Summers wasn’t anything more to him than that—a friend. In fact, I rarely saw my dad this angry, and this seemed to cancel out the wonderful time we’d had camping.

  I sat out on the back steps a long time. Last week had seemed like such a magical time, and now it wasn’t magic at all.

  Elizabeth called later. “My folks are mad,” she said.

  “Welcome to the club,” I told her.

  “Not because I read the book, but because I read it to you and Pamela. Mom says that the book can’t leave the house again without her permission.”

  “Okay, will you ask if I can borrow it, then?”

  “What?” she cried. “You’re crazy, Alice! Honestly, sometimes I just don’t understand you at all!”

  It was beginning to sound familiar.

  I think that of all the times in the past couple of years I’d felt most alone, this was the worst. I needed someone to talk to, and Dad wasn’t talking, Lester wasn’t home, and I sure didn’t want to call Aunt Sally.

  I went up to my room and wondered if
it was times like this a mom would come in and sit beside you. Put an arm around you and, no matter how you were feeling, say she’d felt like that once when she was your age.

  That’s how I imagined it would be. Like the mothers on TV, the way they looked at their child when the kid had a little cough. As though this was the most important cough in the world. Would it really be like that, or was this only a fantasy?

  At dinner that night, I wanted to find out if Dad was still mad at me. I had to start learning to head off trouble before it started. So when Dad seemed extra quiet, I asked, “Is there any book in the house that you don’t want me to read aloud to Pamela and Elizabeth?”

  “Not that I can think of offhand,” he said. “You starting a book discussion club or something?”

  “No. More like … uh … stories.”

  “I’ve got an excellent short-story collection, Al. You’re welcome to it.”

  “Well, not exactly stories,” I said, and when Lester gave me a quizzical look, I said, “More like … uh … how-to-do-it books.”

  “How to do what?” asked Lester.

  “Home decorating? Sewing?” asked Dad.

  “Bodies,” I told him. “You know. Growing up and everything.”

  “She wants a sex manual,” said Lester.

  “Lester!” I yelled.

  “Al,” Dad said, “there isn’t any book in this house you can’t read, but some are valuable first editions, so I’d prefer you didn’t lend them.”

  “Thanks, Dad,” I said, and turned up my nose at Lester.

  After dinner I walked slowly along Dad’s bookshelves and thumbed through every title that looked as though it had possibilities. I couldn’t understand it. The Prices are Catholic, and they had the unexpurgated edition of Tales from the Arabian Nights. We don’t go to church much, and the closest I could find were love poems by Robert Browning, and Coming of Age in Samoa. Was life weird or what?

  A second letter came for me the next day. This time I checked the postmark before I opened it: Canada.